Given that I brought up CA requirements, I felt I would be remiss not to circle back and say that it appears there is no Environmental Engineer PE license in CA. For such states, an individual not interested in grad school and who wants PE authority to sign-off on construction designs for civil projects might want to consider Civil Engineering for their undergrad degree.
That said, I think it’s often informative to consider how top schools approach a given field, and what those approaches suggest they would tell their own undergrads interested in environmental engineering careers.
At Caltech, there’s no undergraduate environmental engineering degree, but there is a graduate option. I suspect they don’t consider their undergraduate offerings lacking, but would, instead, advise a student to pursue their civil engineering major (not ABET accredited) or a basic science like physics or chemistry, then to pursue environmental engineering through work experience or grad school.
At Stanford, there is an Environmental Systems Engineering undergraduate major, but it is not ABET accredited. I imagine an advisor there would not deem it unreasonable to suggest a student select that major if interested in environmental engineering, then plan on getting the necessary work experience if they wanted to later pursue a PE license.
https://cee.stanford.edu/academics-admission/undergraduate-degrees
At MIT, their Civil and Environmental Engineering department offers a general Engineering degree that is ABET accredited. However, it appears that there is an option to concentrate on environmental engineering within that degree, though I can’t tell if that translates to degree title.
At Berkeley, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Dept offers a degree in Civil Engineering that is ABET accredited.
https://ce.berkeley.edu/undergrad/curriculum
Of course, there are many other great schools, and some will have different approaches from the above. I wouldn’t feel it’s my place to say what’s best for a given individual. Part of what makes this tricky is that states can have different requirements, and what is meant by “environmental engineering” can actually be quite broad and even include what some might consider to be research work. If nothing else, I hope to have offered information that might be useful in forming questions OP can ask themselves down the road. It does seem to me that someone who wants to work in the field of environmental engineering should at least consider civil engineering. But the good news (in my opinion anyway!) is that there’s likely numerous ways to carve out a successful career path in the field.
Good luck again to the OP! Learning more about all this has been an interesting experience for me.